The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Currently, managing, monitoring, and controlling remote oil and gas field equipment is a time consuming and cumbersome process. Systems must be controlled and monitored by multiple on-site personnel, and require significant labor, time, and cost. The problem is even more significant for large, distributed installations of multiple machines distributed across multiple locations, sometimes all over the world. The problem becomes even more complicated with operations in remote locations, far from personnel and located in places that are difficult or expensive to reach.
Background relative to one example of application of the present invention to oil and gas equipment is now described. Currently liquids-rich raw natural gas is being flared in large quantities at numerous locations by oil producers. This activity entails significant loss of income that could be earned by selling the flared natural gas liquids. Still more financial losses are entailed by failing to make use of the methane content of the flared gas to generate power. As a result, such oil producers have to buy their electric power from the grid, or even worse, generate it themselves at significant cost (typically USD$ 0.40/kWh) through the use of on-site diesel generators consuming expensive fuel. Furthermore, the large-scale flaring of natural gas has raised environmental issues that could cause state and/or federal regulators to take action to fine, shutdown, or highly regulate their operations.
The United States oil and gas industry annually flared approximately 7.1 billion cubic meters (bcm), or 250 billion cubic feet (bcf) in 2011 (Source: Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership, Estimated Flared Volumes from Satellite Data, 2007-2011, 2013), and the situation has only gotten worse in 2014. “Flaring will escalate as oil producers approach the milestone of 1 million barrels a day from the Bakken formation, a 360-million-year-old shale bed two miles underground. About 10,100 wells produced 29 million barrels of oil in January 2014, according to the North Dakota Industrial Commission. Drillers flared 340 million cubic feet (mmcf), or 34 percent, of the 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas produced per day in January 2014, about twice as much as the 184 million cubic feet burned per day in 2011, said Marcus Stewart, an analyst at Denver-based Bentek Energy. ‘The lost revenue adds up to $1.4 million each day,’ said Stewart. Energy executives say economic realities force them to start producing oil from wells before infrastructure is in place to haul away less-valuable natural gas. Bakken oil fetched $98.14 on Apr. 4, 2014 while natural gas for May 2014 delivery fell to $4.44 per MMBTU on the New York Mercantile Exchange the same day. ‘We absolutely don't want to flare the gas, that's lost revenue,’ said Russell Rankin, a regional manager for Norway-based Statoil. ‘But if we drill a $10 million well, we've got lots of investors and they can't wait to get that revenue back,’ said Rankin.” (Source: Jennifer Oldham, A Landscape of Fire Rises Over North Dakota's Gas Fields, Bloomberg News, Apr. 7, 2014)
Canada also has significant flare gas resources. It is estimated that Canada flared 2.4 billion m3 per year in 2011 (Source: Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership, Estimated Flared Volumes from Satellite Data, 2007-2011, 2013.) It is estimated that the Canadian province of Alberta alone flared 868 million m3 and vented another 333 million m3 in 2007. (Source: Bott, R. D., Flaring Questions and Answers, 2nd ed., Canadian Centre for Energy Information, 2007.) A similar situation holds around the world, with significant quantities of gas flared in Russia, Nigeria, and other parts of the world.
Despite the recent oil price drop in 2015, due to a glut of oil from fracking flooding the world markets, flaring of stranded gas continues to be a problem in the U.S., Canada, and around the world. Therefore, there exists an important need for a solution to address the problem of utilizing raw natural gas to the maximum extent and to minimize or eliminate flaring completely.
However, often the locations of such flares and stranded gas are remote and far from human operations. This makes controlling, monitoring, and managing such systems extremely complicated and expensive.
Accordingly, as recognized by the present inventors, what are needed are a novel method, apparatus, and system for controlling remote oil and gas field systems.
Therefore, it would be an advancement in the state of the art to provide an apparatus, system, and method for cost-effectively controlling, monitoring, and managing remote oil and gas field systems, allowing such systems to be widely deployed to geographically remote locations around the world. It would also be an advancement in the state of the art to provide systems and methods to allow such systems to be cost-effectively installed, deployed, and commissioned, from a central control operations center located in a central location, capable of managing many such widely distributed systems.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.